Wrangling at the UN while blood flows

INSTEAD of hostilities coming to an end, the delay in arriving at a consensus on a ceasefire resolution at the Security Council is contributing to more bloodshed. It was not clear when these lines were being written whether the Israeli ground offensive had begun. Earlier reports said Tel Aviv had decided to put it on hold. However, early on Thursday, 30,000 Israeli troops backed by tanks and armoured vehicles entered the town of Marjayoun, were moving towards other towns and were engaged in heavy fighting with Hezbollah guerillas. Civilian lives too were being lost, for on Wednesday, Israel once again shelled a Palestinian refugee camp. Regrettably, the diplomats at the UN seem to show no sense of urgency to end the bloodshed. The revised US-French draft resolution, circulated to the Security Council members on Saturday, called for “a full cessation of hostilities” with both Hezbollah and Israel stopping all offensive activity. However, the Lebanese view, supported by other Arab countries, is that such a resolution will leave Israel in possession of parts of southern Lebanon when hostilities end.

What the Lebanese want is a resolution that will call both for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel’s withdrawal from areas under its control. The US obviously does not agree with such a view because it does not favour Israel. The Lebanese plea is based on common sense, for it says that the presence of Israeli troops on Lebanese soil will mean a new occupation, and it cited Hezbollah’s vow that it will attack any Israeli soldiers seen on Lebanese soil. For that reason, French President Jacques Chirac, who wants the Lebanese concerns to be accommodated in the resolution, asked the US to speed up its response to the Arab views, saying any delay in effecting a ceasefire would be “most immoral”.

Unless a ceasefire and immediate withdrawal of the troops from south Lebanon take place, there is every possibility that Israel will continue to bring more troops and armour into south Lebanon. This will take hostilities to a higher level of intensity, for Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has vowed to turn Lebanon into Israel’s graveyard. Israel and the US will be making a grave mistake if they think that the Hezbollah chief is bluffing. Originally, Israel thought that it would make short work of Hezbollah and the fighting would be over in a week. Instead, a month has passed and the Israeli army has been bogged down hopelessly in the same area where it had suffered casualties and humiliation for 18 long years at Hezbollah’s hands. In his TV speech on Wednesday, Sheikh Nasrallah said his soldiers had destroyed 60 Israeli tanks and dozens of bulldozers and armoured vehicles. Given the Hezbollah fighters’ dedication to their cause, it is doubtful if Israel will achieve its aim. The removal of the Israeli general in charge of the northern command is a clear indication of the failure of Israeli plans. Now latest reports say that the military has told the Israeli cabinet that it will need another 30 days to accomplish the job. The diplomats at the UN ought to know that more civilians than soldiers have died in the fighting. The same ratio of casualties will be there if the war continues and Israel pushes deeper into Lebanon. Diplomatic sources say that the earliest a ceasefire resolution could be passed is Saturday. By that time more civilians would be dead, maimed and rendered homeless.

Perks and privileges

THE Speaker of the National Assembly seems convinced that some matters are best ignored altogether. The perks and privileges of parliamentarians is one such taboo subject for Chaudhry Amir Hussain. The speaker’s standard response to any mention of House expenses is to brush the matter aside, to the approval of the treasury benches as well as large sections of the opposition. But there are exceptions. On Wednesday, he lost his temper when an MP questioned the “excessive expenses” of parliamentarians, in particular the foreign trips undertaken by the Senate chairman and the Assembly speaker. Besides asking him to refrain from joining “conspiracies” against the House, the speaker also cast aspersions on the member by questioning the proprieties of his conduct. Two MMA leaders joined the attack with irrelevant remarks about the dissenting MP’s business interests.

The speaker’s testiness is understandable. Amir Hussain is, after all, the public representative who justified his demand for a 12-million-rupee Mercedes on the grounds that his Iranian counterpart was given an aeroplane for official use. He is the person who approved the creation of 57 posts in the National Assembly Secretariat which need not be advertised as they would be filled at the sole discretion of the speaker. Also, he needs a four-storey official residence that will cost nearly Rs85 million to build — and that includes neither running costs nor, possibly, the value of the land. The National Assembly’s annual budget, meanwhile, is now touching the one billion mark, a figure hotly contested by the speaker who insists that it is no more than Rs980 million. Not to be left behind, the Senate chairman has also requisitioned a Rs12 million Mercedes. He is said to have made 51 foreign trips on taxpayers’ money, compared to the Assembly speaker’s estimated 32. Contrary to the speaker’s assertion on Wednesday, there is no justification whatsoever for these needless expenses and lavish lifestyles, particularly in a country where primary concerns such as education, healthcare, poverty alleviation and employment generation are perennially starved of funds.

Curbing indoctrination

THE chilling tale of the 23-year-old Frontier-based suicide bomber Aminullah, who blew himself up in southern Afghanistan last month killing 10 people, comes as a reminder of the dangerous kind of indoctrination being done at some seminaries. Incitement to terrorism, regardless of whether the targets are within or outside the country, is a reprehensible act because of its consequences: the killing mostly of innocent people. There have been many acts of terror committed against high-profile people in Pakistan, the July 14 killing of Allama Hasan Turabi in Karachi being one. Press reports suggest that despite the ban imposed by the government on a number of religious outfits, many of these have either resurfaced under different names or their operatives have gone underground, continuing their deadly work. This consists mainly of recruiting young boys and turning them into ‘jihadis’ to carry out acts of terrorism in the name of Islam. While those masterminding such indoctrination and prodding have either remained at large or been disarmed by the authorities, scores of young men have been sent to death in pursuit of false goals set before them.

It is time the myriad of intelligence agencies operating in the country were depoliticised and held accountable for their failure to identify and track down the masterminds behind such gruesome activities that continue to strain Pakistan’s relations with some of its neighbours. These also present the country in a terrible light abroad, with many countries blaming it for being a breeding ground of violence and terror with a politico-religious motivation. There is a dire need to implement the madressah registration law and a reform programme to ensure that no indoctrination of the wrong kind is allowed to take place in the name of religion, and to close down those seminaries which resist such a process on any grounds whatsoever.

Commercialisation of education

VARIABLE tuition fees for university students are New Labour's worst domestic policy mistake. This is why: "The social class gap among those entering higher education is a national disgrace. Students from middle-class backgrounds were three times more likely to go to university than those from poorer backgrounds. That vicious statistic has to be reversed." So said former secretary of state for education Charles Clarke in January 2003.

That was then; this is now. You are 18. You have slogged your guts out to be the first in your family to go to university. Next Wednesday is A level results day. You know you have done well. But that's not good enough. £3,000 annual fees, to be introduced next month, create debt and a fear of debt that mean it's a gamble you just can't take.

With fees totalling £9,000, and average living costs of £12,000, you know you can't afford to walk away owing more than £20,000. University is out of reach -- not of your ability, but of your pocket. You think about your better-off friends getting ready to go. They have the confidence, and the mummies and daddies, to pay off large debts. This is the summer of friends, places and ideas that will never be yours.

Before the tuition fees act was passed, Professor Claire Callender, author of a study commissioned by education ministers, wrote: "Variable fees increase both the costs of higher education for students and their debt. Both deter low-income groups' participation." She said the new reforms would "reassert elitism in higher education. Privileged students who populate top universities will pay high fees, but get highly valued degrees. Low income and access students who populate universities at the bottom of the hierarchy will pay less and get less, but still end up with large debts."

Now official figures show she was right. The percentage of students going to university from poor families has fallen. The number from all state schools has fallen too. Little wonder, when 47% of sixth formers questioned by the Universities Marketing Forum said that inability to afford fees was likely to put them off a degree. Poorer students' debt has already risen dramatically - by two and half times since 1998 - and is on average 43% higher than that of children from better-off families.

A Higher Education Funding Council report said teenagers in the richest areas could expect a better than 50% chance of going to university, while in the poorest neighbourhoods it is 10%. Universities are an expanding closed shop, filled by more stupid middle-class children. Why has a Labour government made that "vicious statistic" worse?

The answer lies in New Labour's uncritical acceptance of globalisation. The elite universities endlessly badgered the prime minister for funding freedom to compete with America's Ivy League. It is an argument for entrenched elitism that will be made worse by variable fees.

I was told at the time by a minister that the government had looked at 76 varieties of funding. Variable fees were picked because they most resembled the operation of a market, allowing the "best" universities to attract the "best" students, ie those who can pay most. The successful universities could then distinguish themselves from the competition. Where price equals value, competition can drive efficiency and encourage the survival of the fittest. This is what untrammelled globalisations demands.

This commercialisation of higher education serves a bigger purpose, though. It softens students up for the rigours of globalisation. By creating a market, young people are encouraged to think and behave like rational economic man. They become "human capital", calculating the rate of return on their university investment. A degree becomes a share certificate. Commercialisation conditions students to expect no help from others, or society, and therefore never to provide help in return. Debt and economic conditioning discourages graduates from going into lower-paid caring jobs - and instead into the City, where the real "value" is. It fashions a Britain that competes rather than cares.

Tony Blair has said that universities are the "coalmines of the 21st century". This is a grim, dogmatic economism that fails to chime with the beliefs of many young people who are trying to turn away from the long-hours culture of many jobs, who aren't only interested in maximising profits, but keen to work for social enterprises and charities. They want to do good, not just make good.

Variable fees haven't yet worked as well as the government hoped. With a cap of £3,000, most universities have stuck at the highest level. A few have "sold" places at £2,000 to encourage take up. But do we want universities that in effect pile them high to sell them cheap? The pressure is on to lift the fees cap, so real variability can kick in. Then the market can sort the wheat from the chaff. One former head of the funding council is predicting £5,000 by 2010. Others think £10,000 is more likely.

The government has put a financial support package together - but it's clearly not working. Instead young people are calculating that the size of debt means it's not worth the risk. Not least when globalisation ensures that many graduate jobs are being outsourced to places like India where the better qualified work for less.

If New Labour has a social philosophy it is of a meritocracy. Here the state provides the opportunity for everyone to flourish to the best of their ability. But unchecked markets mean social mobility is already declining. Variable fees will make it worse. —Dawn/Guardian Service

The writer is chairman of the left-of-centre pressure group Compass.

Relevant Quranic guidance

IN the present global scene, non-Muslims appear to be converging on an anti-Muslim agenda because of their perceived danger from what they call 'radical' Islam. What is happening in the Middle East, which can rightly be called Islam's heartland, requires the true believers to turn to the Quran for guidance and Divine help, in the inscrutable ways that the Almighty extends to those who deserve it.

Such help lends amazing strength to the material efforts that are necessary for the Muslims to protect their interests as a community constituting one-fifth of humanity.

Even the sceptics among Muslims, and there is no dearth of them, and those who are more concerned to protect their personal interests in retaining their hold on pelf and power in the Muslim world, should heed the Divine advice available in the various Suras of the holy Quran.

An attempt has been made, hereunder, to piece together these advices and edicts from the Scripture. It will appear that although they were revealed a millennium and a half ago, they are applicable to the current Middle East crisis in almost the same way as they were applicable to the situation that prevailed during the infancy of Islam in its place of origin.

It has taken a lot of labour to extract from the Book the advices that are ideally relevant for today's Muslims to fight their way with success through the hostile circumstances in which they appear to have been caught.

Apt quotations are manifold and the select ones can be arranged as such: "Take not the Jews and Christians for friends. They are friends of one another" (5:51). Should this edict not form the basis on which foreign policies of Muslim states be crafted although in a diplomatic manner to avoid dangerous confrontation with the opposite party? As we will see, the Quran never encourages reckless action oblivious of the dire consequences that may follow.

"The believers should not take disbelievers for friends in preference to believers, and who so does it has no connection with Allah, except that it is a measure of security to guard yourself against them" (3:28). The Quran never makes a rigid statement that cannot be interpreted slightly differently under special circumstances. So, in the above edict much room has been left for the Muslim societies and states to adopt a policy that would safeguard their security and not endanger their lives and liberty.

"Show kindness to them who did not wage war against you on account of your religion and deal justly with them" (60:8). This is the conciliatory and friendly face of Islam showing how Muslim individuals and states should display softness in their dealings with their non-Muslim counterparts in peace time

While, in the preceding space, the focus was on the ways in which Muslims should conduct their affairs in warlike or hostile situations, the above Quranic injunction provides the guidelines of dealings - social and political - with non-Muslim societies and states in normal times when the conflict has either subsided or resolved completely.

It needs no re-statement, because what has been stated above has made the issue abundantly clear that the Quran, revealed more than a thousand years ago, has the best advice to offer to its believers in all kinds of situations, in war and in peace, — a quality not to be expected from scripts of human origin.

Having established that the Quranic advice is available for adoption by concerned Muslim societies, or states, in varying situations of strength and weakness and during war or peace, it must be made explicit that such advice can produce the desired result only when it is acted upon with full faith by such Muslims who are not secular-minded and do not have a lurking doubt about the Divine origin of the scripture.

The Quran makes it sufficiently clear in the beginning of the first Sura (Al-Baqra) following the opening Sura (Al-Fatiha) that this book will guide only those who believe in the 'unseen.'

The word 'unseen' can be interpreted in many ways. No doubt, God Himself is in the centre of the 'unseen' but there are myriad others - the future existence of human life after death being the main issue.

According to the Quran, the soul of man does never die; it is the mortal frame in which it survives during man's life on earth which is subject to death and decay. Not the soul, which remains preserved for accountability on the Day of Judgment.